Nokia: Beautiful Phones In the Pipelines

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop confirmed in an interview on Finnish television that “beautiful [Lumia] phones are coming.” When asked about the Lumia 928, a phone that’s rumored for Verizon Wireless in the U.S. with an updated aluminum design that’s slimmer and lighter than the Lumia 920 flagship of today, Elop elusively states that “there is so much good work ahead. I mean some of the beautiful phones still ahead we’re so excited about.”

Nokia, which has been known and praised for the camera technologies employed by its smartphones for some time now, says that the new generations of Lumia smartphones in the pipeline will play up Nokia’s heritage for design as well as the company’s history for producing good cameras.

The Lumia 920, for example, continues with the design of the award-winning Lumia 800 that debuted with Windows Phone 7, and brings to the table Carl Zeiss optics along with image stabilization for video and extremely good low light photography without the need for a flash. The Lumia 928 has been rumored to extend the strengths of the Lumia 920 with a slimmer aluminum shell in different colors along with a single LED flash and the inclusion of a Xenon flash, unlike the dual LED flash solution on the Lumia 920. The Xenon flash will be extremely bright and will be able to freeze motion and capture more accurate colors than LED; Xenon flash technology is what’s typically found on point-and-shoot cameras.

Well the reason we believe that is we believe we can effectively compete with those other products by emphasizing the consumer experiences, the capabilities of these devices that are better than anything else. So with the 920 when we introduced that and said, ‘boy you can take pictures in a dark room, you can see and use the bright display under the bright Finnish sunlight that we’ve been enjoying over the past few days, I can control the screen with my glove on, and on and on and on’ if we focus on that great innovation, that Nokia is so good at and if we get that into our products then we will improve it.

Elop was careful to not mention the highly anticipated and oft-rumored Lumia 928 by name, even when pressed by his interviewer.

And while the camera technology on the Lumia 920 is great and far exceeds what we’ve seen on many modern phones today, mobile photography enthusiasts are still awaiting a day when the 41-megapixel PureView technology from the Nokia 808 smartphone will make it to a Lumia Windows Phone model.

Tech enthusiast in Silicon Valley enjoying the possibilities of ubiquitous connectivity, information sharing, and collaboration enabled by mobile broadband. You can contact Chuong on Twitter @chuongvision or search +chuongvision on Google+.